The present disclosure relates to analyzing time differences between incoming messages and outgoing messages at nodes of a system of communicating nodes. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to determining probability distributions representative of time differences between causally related incoming and outgoing messages for nodes of a system of communicating nodes.
Information systems, such as Internet-based systems, are often composed of multiple communicating components and are often structured as distributed systems, wherein different components may run on different computers, on different processors or in different processes. Such systems may exhibit slow performance in the sense that components of the system may have large time delays (also referred to as latencies) between causally related incoming and outgoing messages, and it can be difficult to identify the source(s) of such slow performance. For example, software may come from different vendors, and source code for the software may not be available. In addition, different vendors may provide support for their own components, but not for problems associated with communication between components of multiple vendors. Identifying problematic components to diagnose and debug such systems can be challenging and time consuming, especially for complex systems.